Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century (83)

In Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul chronicles the descent of a Central
African nation (Zaire) from postColonial disruption to New African corruption
to utter chaos & hooliganism. All of these events are seen through
the eyes of Salim, a Muslim Indian shopkeeper, whose store is in a town
where, decades earlier, the faltering Arabs first confronted the ascendant
Europeans. Just as the Europeans replaced the Arabs, indigenous movements
are now sending the Europeans packing.

Salim is in an especially tenuous position, neither European nor African,
he is trapped in the collision between African Nationalism and a heritage
of European colonialism. He is not an apologist for the West, but
he does acknowledge that:

Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before
the Europeans had never lied about
ourselves. Not because we were more moral. We didn't
lie because we never assessed ourselves
and didn't think there was anything for us to lie
about; we were people who simply did what we did.
But the Europeans could do one thing and say something
quite different; and they could act in this
way because they had an idea of what they owed to
their civilization. It was their great
advantage over us. The Europeans wanted gold and
slaves, like everybody else; but at the same
time they wanted statues put up to themselves as
people who had done good things for the slaves.
Being an intelligent and energetic people, at the
peak of their powers, they could express both sides
of their civilization; and they got both the slaves
and the statues.

On the other hand, he describes the natives as malins, humans who treat
other humans as prey. Meanwhile Salim and his people are merely trying
to get along: "My wish was not to be good,...but to make good."

His willingness to look honestly at the deterioration of conditions
in former colonies when the Europeans withdraw and his criticism of the
natives of these lands has earned Naipaul the enmity of many. But
his novels offer an important corrective to the romantic view of the Third
World and they were especially useful at the time, the 60's & 70's,
when they were published.